Aimee Quirk: What is innovationOchsner?

A plethora of health apps and wearables have become available in recent years, but in many cases, they may be used outside of care a patient receives from their providers. A team called innovationOchsner has been working to incorporate useful technology in ways that benefit patients and providers.

Aimee Quirk, CEO of innovationOchsner at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans shared about the ways her team is bring in new technologies to improve pain points in the health care system for patients and providers.

One introduction was the O Bar, modeled after Apple’s genius bar, where patients are connected with devices and apps their providers recommend for them. Another innovation is the introduction of their digital medicine programs that provide remote monitoring for patients with conditions like hypertension and diabetes.

What is the role of innovationOchsner (iO)?

Well I'll tell you a little bit about iO—innovationOchsner—which is Ochsner Health System Innovation Lab. It was formed in 2015, a little over 3 years ago, as a team embedded within Ochsner to introduce new ideas and new thinking—to reimagine the experience and delivery of healthcare. It's this idea that—can we solve real-world pain points by thinking about new technology, new thinking, new science, new ideas and introduce it into our system quickly, much like a startup embedded within the health system would do.

What does the O Bar bring to the health care equation?

The O Bar is certainly one critical piece of something new that we've introduced to our system and to the industry as a way to be able to connect our community to the burgeoning field of health care tech, whether it's apps, connected devices, you name it. Then we've also used it to support some of the digital programs that we've created from iO as well.

What are some of these digital medicine programs?

We've done a lot in remote monitoring, so using connected devices to be able to get data from patients wherever they are outside of the 4 walls of our clinic, but to bring it into our system and to be able to provide proactive care. So, we've launched a platform that we call digital medicine which includes many chronic diseases—hypertension and diabetes today, we have COPD in development and several others. And we've also used the platform in other areas like pregnancy. We have a program called Connected MOM [Connected Maternity Online Monitoring], which uses technology tools to monitor expectant mothers while they're living their lives in hopes that we can detect problems earlier and possibly eliminate some doctor's visits if everything looks like it's going okay.